The meanings of Mein Kampf

New Statesman​

a day ago

Photo byJust over 100 years ago, on 18 July 1925, the most notorious book of the 20th century was published – Mein Kampf ('My Struggle') by Adolf Hitler, who became dictator of Germany less than eight years later. It has been described as the epitome of 'absolute evil', the 'most disgusting of all books' and 'the nadir of depravity'. More than a few historians have regarded the book as providing a blueprint for what came later, from the destruction of German democracy and the genocide of Europe's Jews to the launching of the Second World War and the ruthless ethnic cleansing of Eastern Europe by the Nazis. Its centenary provides an opportunity for re-examining its origins, its nature and its influence.
Hitler began writing the book during a period of enforced idleness following his arrest and imprisonment for leading a violent attempt to overthrow the state government of Bavaria on 9 November 1923 – the so-called Beer Hall Putsch – which ended in a hail of bullets fired at him and his Nazi supporters by the Bavarian police. Brought to trial in Munich on 26 February 1924, Hitler claimed that he had acted purely out of patriotic motives. He regarded the democratic political order of the Weimar Republic, founded in the wake of Germany's defeat in the First World War and the overthrow of the Kaiser, as an expression of anti-German sentiments. It was dominated by liberals and socialists who had put their names to what he saw as Germany's betrayal in the Treaty of Versailles. He found a willing listener in the judge, Georg Neithardt, who allowed him to speak at length from the dock, and meted out to him the remarkably lenient sentence of five years in 'fortress confinement', a form of punishment reserved for offenders who had acted from 'honourable' motives, such as duellists.
Immediately after the failure of the putsch, Hitler had been plunged into a deep depression and gave serious thought to suicide. He even began a hunger strike in protest against his arrest and incarceration. But he pulled himself together with the help of his close political associates and wrote a lengthy defence of his actions for use in court. This formed the kernel of the far longer piece of writing that eventually became Mein Kampf. He was able to compose it because, under the astonishingly indulgent conditions of his sentence, he was allowed visitors – 325 of them altogether during his months of confinement. Some of them, notably Winifred Wagner, the English-born daughter-in-law of the composer Richard Wagner, brought him reams of paper and writing materials, while his patron and tutor Helene Bechstein provided a typewriter. Meanwhile, his visitors supplied him with so much food that his cell was known in the prison as 'the delicatessen'.
Hitler was a relatively uneducated man, and it used to be thought that he had dictated much of the text to his fellow inmate and slavish admirer Rudolf Hess, who had studied history and economics at the University of Munich. But in fact we now know that the writing was all Hitler's own work. His style was crude and unpolished, and the book is rambling, poorly structured and often difficult to follow. Its original title, which his publisher got him to drop in favour of the snappier Mein Kampf , was Four and a Half Years [of Struggle] Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice. Had he not followed his publisher's advice, the book might have sold fewer copies.
As he worked on the book, continuing to write after his release on 20 December 1924, Hitler began to take it away from the original concept of an 'accounting' with the people he blamed for frustrating his attempt at a coup in 1923. Short of money, and keen to establish his political credentials as leader of the ultra right in Germany, he decided to publish the book in two volumes, of which the first, more autobiographical one, came out on 18 July 1925 and the second, more programmatical one, on 10 December 1926. Hess and his wife, Ilse, along with an editor at the Völkischer Beobachter newspaper, devoted many hours to correcting the many linguistic mistakes and infelicities in the script and the proofs.
The Beer Hall Putsch and Hitler's subsequent trial for treason had transformed him from a local politician mainly known in Bavaria into a nationally notorious far-right agitator. But Mein Kampf was still fairly limited in its impact – hardly surprising, since the Nazis won less than 3 per cent of the vote in the national elections of 1928. Nevertheless, his newly acquired notoriety ensured that the first printing of volume one – 10,000 copies – was almost sold out by the end of 1925 and was quickly reprinted. Evidently readers were keen to know who Hitler was and where he came from. Lacking the autobiographical element, volume two did not do nearly so well. But a 'popular' one-volume edition published in 1930, at a time when the Nazis were rapidly gaining support, sold 228,000 copies by the end of 1932. By this time the party had risen to become the largest in the Reichstag, the national legislature.
Appointed head of a national coalition government on 30 January 1933, Hitler intimidated and outmanoeuvered his conservative-nationalist coalition partners and established a one-party dictatorship by the summer of 1933. Mein Kampf now became a key symbol of the ruling Nazi Party. Although sales to the general public fell off sharply after the first months of the regime, the book sold some 12.5 million copies between its publication and the end of Hitler's self-styled 'Third Reich' in 1945. There were deluxe editions, a braille edition for blind readers, and an edition printed on especially thin paper for soldiers to carry with them when they went into battle to ensure they knew what, and whom, they were fighting for. Altogether, eight million copies were printed during the war. Symbolically, as Hitler began to redefine the war as a struggle for Western civilisation against the Bolshevik hordes, instead of a drive for Germany's world domination, he decreed that the book should be printed in a roman typeface instead of the previously employed gothic one, known as Fraktur and employed mainly in Germany.
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Those unwilling or unable to afford the book could still borrow it from a public, high-school or university library. In the first two or three years of the Nazi dictatorship, libraries of all kinds bought multiple copies, though not so much in south Germany, where the Catholic Church and its institutions were in control of acquisitions. The few available statistics show in similar fashion that borrowing figures were highest at the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship but then, like sales, fell off sharply. Many histories of Nazism lay considerable stress on the fact that under the Third Reich, a copy of Mein Kampf was supposed to be given to every pair of newlyweds upon their marriage, a custom originally established by the publisher to offload surplus copies because of disappointing sales. But many municipalities were too cash-strapped to afford to buy copies for this purpose, and by 1939 only about half of Germany's local authorities had actually purchased the book. Big cities such as Frankfurt, where there were no fewer than 7,000 marriages a year, told the publisher they could not afford it.
How many of all these millions of copies were actually read? After the war, claims were widespread in Germany that most people who had bought or been given the book had not actually bothered to read it. Echoing these claims, historians outside Germany opined that if they had actually taken the trouble to peruse it, Germans would have been better equipped to prevent Hitler's rise to power. Whether this would actually have been the case may be doubted: after all, nearly two thirds of the German electorate still voted against the Nazis in free national elections in 1932. But even if they did not read the book from cover to cover, millions of Germans would have been made familiar with its contents through the extracts and quotations constantly presented to them by national and local newspapers and magazines. In December 1936, a secret report smuggled out of Germany to the exiled Social Democratic leadership in Prague concluded that among the educated classes people had read the passages dealing with 'the history of Hitler's youth, perhaps also in addition a few sections on the Jews, but nobody reads the whole book'.
Nobody who knew anything about Mein Kampf during the Nazi years could doubt the virulence of Hitler's anti-Semitism. Here in full view was the grotesque and paranoid conspiracy theory that led Hitler to believe 'the Jew' – he always put the term in the singular, to emphasise his conviction that all Jews were driven by their racial character to act as a collective, spreading subversion and degeneracy wherever they lived – was to blame for all the ills and evils that beset the world, and especially Germany. Hitler refused to accept that Germany had lost the First World War militarily – it had fallen victim to a Jewish-led conspiracy of socialists on the home front, which had stabbed the army in the back (there was no truth in this allegation: German Jews had fought bravely on the front, and the army had been defeated on the battlefield, mainly by the rapidly growing superiority of the Western Allies in tanks).
For Hitler, the Jews were 'vermin', 'plague bacilli', not human at all. 'If one had on some occasion at the start of the war,' he wrote in an oft-quoted passage in volume two, 'held twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew polluters of the people down under poison gas, like hundreds of thousands of our best German workers from all classes and professions in the army at the front had to suffer, then the millionfold sacrifices of the front would not have been in vain.' The Jews – in fact, even if defined by race rather than religion, less than 1 per cent of the German population – must at the very least be deprived of their rights as German citizens.
More generally, Mein Kampf made it clear that democracy had to be destroyed and a dictatorship created under his leadership. Besides dealing with the Jews, he would introduce measures to 'purify' the German race by eugenic sterilisation of the 'unfit', and make extensive use of the death penalty to destroy any resistance to his rule. Germany, forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles from possessing an army of more than 100,000 men, along with combat aircraft and ships, would rearm and launch a second world war to reverse the defeat of the first one, conquering vast swathes of eastern Europe to provide 'living space', or, in other words, food and other resources for the German people.
Yet Mein Kampf, however much it might seem to foreshadow Hitler's future actions in retrospect, was very far from being a blueprint for action. Many of its more programmatic statements were to be ignored by Hitler once he came to power, from raising the real wages of the workers to defending the federated states against the central authority in Berlin. In fact, Hitler was to abolish the federal system under which Germany was governed and create a centralised political authority far more powerful than anything that had come before. His promise to protect the workers fell victim to his all-consuming drive to rearm. Mein Kampf 's promise to create an alliance with 'England' remained unfulfilled.
What emerged most clearly from the book's pages was Hitler's absolutism: decisions were 'unalterable', opponents would be 'annihilated', policies were 'unconditional'. The murderous hatred at the heart of Hitler's character was expressed in his unambiguous celebration of the unrestrained violence meted out by his stormtroopers to communist counter-demonstrators in the small Franconian town of Coburg the previous year. Nobody could be in any doubt about what would happen to German socialists and communists if he came to power, or to German Jews, to the mentally ill, to people with disabilities . Instead, the majority of Germans who belonged to other political parties thought the Nazis would calm down if they achieved power, as did politicians and statesmen in other countries. How wrong they were.
After the war, Mein Kampf was regarded by the victorious Allies as a dangerous book capable of inspiring a revival of Nazism. It was removed from libraries and banned from going on sale. In Germany itself, the Bavarian government, which held the copyright, refused to allow any copying or reprinting of the book. When the copyright expired at the end of 2015, seven decades after the year of Hitler's death, an extreme right-wing publisher issued a new edition, though the book was officially classified as harmful to the young and liable to incite the masses. Munich's Institute for Contemporary History published a huge, two-volume annotated 'study edition' in which a team of scholars pointed out the book's many lies and distortions and identified the sources for many of Hitler's beliefs. In truth, however, the world in which the future Nazi leader lived and wrote has long disappeared. Anti-Semitism remains a conspiracy theory that fuels prejudice against Jews and carries with it a dismaying potential for violence, but its roots, and the causes of its current flourishing, lie above all in hostility to the State of Israel and the policies its current, right-wing extremist government, is deploying in Gaza and Iran, rather than a book published a century ago by a politician whose name has long been a byword for evil.
Richard J Evans is regius professor of history at the University of Cambridge. His books include 'Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich' (Allen Lane)
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